Why Every Retail Business Needs an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

All multi-location retail companies depend on consistent products and services to build a positive brand. However, they don’t always rely on a consistent hiring process. Managers often lack the resources to effectively recruit; after all, hiring is usually a secondary responsibility to running a store. The result: sub-par hires and high employee turnover.

Attracting and hiring employees that will help you achieve business growth and ultimately stay with the company requires specific skill sets and technology tools. Applicant tracking systems (ATS), which are a type of recruitment software, can help retail businesses attract and hire employees and turn their hiring into a competitive advantage.

4 reasons every retail business should use an ATS

I. Make decentralized, store-centered recruitment efficient

In retail and other branch-based companies, finding and attracting candidates is the responsibility of many people. It could be a mixture of recruiters and talent acquisition specialists, but often falls to the store managers themselves. This makes the hiring process store-centered and driven by store managers.

By providing the right technology for your store managers, you can empower them to make better hires and grow quality teams without losing focus on day-to-day operations.

With an applicant tracking system that is easy to learn and use, you can encourage store managers to adopt the new technology and hire efficiently for their stores.

With an applicant tracking system, it’s easy to design a consistent hiring process that the business needs and leads to better hires. By making the hiring process structured and easy to follow, store managers can spend less time on recruiting while reducing employee turnover and increasing performance.

An ATS can provide store managers, district managers and regional managers with access to their jobs, candidates and stores and encourage them to collaborate easily with the home office when needed. Your store managers will have a standardized recruitment process across the entire organization, and each of them will follow the company’s best practices.

II. Free up time and resources for your store managers

While the main role of a store manager is to sell and increase company profitability, they also have a key role in attracting the right candidates in order to hit their targets. So it’s important that they have simple, streamlined tools that allow them to recruit on the go.

With an applicant tracking system, each store manager has a dedicated portal that’s easy to use. With built-in screening measures and plenty of automation options, you can spend more time interviewing top candidates. A good ATS will sort and rank applicants, contact them by email, and archive their details in a searchable database.

III. Provide better candidate (customer) experience

Whether it’s in-store or online, delivering a great customer experience is vital for your retail business, and it’s no different with your recruitment. Quite often your customers are your potential candidates too! By providing a user-friendly and efficient streamlined experience, your candidates can appreciate their experience and you can improve your brand image.

By having the right ATS, you should be able to seamlessly integrate your candidate journey into your website or dedicated careers site.

IV. Make faster and smarter business decisions

Using an ATS, you’ll be able to collect valuable data and insights that will help you make smarter and faster decisions about your recruitment and your overall business. By having personalized analytics, you’ll be able to constantly optimize your hiring strategy and make a bigger positive impact on your business.

There are several features available in ATS solutions, but some of them are more relevant to the retail industry than others. Here are the most relevant features that every retail business should be looking at when assessing an ATS.

Key ATS features for retail business

Screening for personality

Most employees in retail companies directly interact with customers. Having employees with the right personality can help to sell more products and increase customer loyalty. Therefore, hiring for personality becomes very important in any retail company. Using an ATS can help you rate candidates’ personalities using a suggested rating system.

Organizing employee referrals

Internal referrals are a valuable way to find great employees while retaining the employees that you have. You can use an ATS to organize your employee referral program and provide an easy tool for your employees to recommend their friends and family members for open positions.

Planning for seasonal peaks

Most retail businesses can be affected by seasonal shifts in sales. Using an ATS, you can access your historical data to accurately plan for seasonal shifts and determine the number of employees that you need to hire. Then you can use the ATS to proactively post jobs, so that you have plenty of time to screen candidates before you actually need them.

Data-driven decisions

Using an ATS, you can have valuable analytics about your entire recruitment process. You can easily create reports that measure and monitor, in real time, all aspects of your hiring process. You can monitor and measure the effectiveness of your sourcing channels, and create reports by store, by district, or by region — and by each type of user (Store Manager, District Manager, etc.). Having such reports will give you valuable insights and help you make optimal business decisions.

Store career site

Have a dedicated section in the career site for each store to instantly publish the jobs related to that store. Store managers can share, in front of their store or online, a link to their career site to encourage candidates to apply.

Store dashboard

Instantly view the status of all jobs and applicants. Track all pending tasks such as interviews to be scheduled, new hires to be onboarded, and more.

Job creation and management

Create jobs from scratch or from job templates and publish them instantly on the career site and external job boards.

Candidate search

Search and compare a high volume of candidates based on key criteria such as keywords, availability, or personality assessment score.

Automated communication

Quickly select a batch of candidates and automatically send them emails (rejection, acceptance, interviews, etc.).

Interview management

Easily schedule interviews and send automatic branded emails to prepare and remind candidates of their appointments.

Offer management

View all offers pending candidate approval, start onboarding for candidates who accepted them, and review reasons given by candidates who rejected offers.

Onboarding

Leverage personalized email templates to prepare new employees for their first day, plus share the onboarding schedule and employer branding material.

Web-based ATS

If you want to manage your entire hiring process without IT staff involvement, you can opt for a web-based ATS. Such a system requires no software to buy or hardware to install or manage. Users simply log in from any web browser and manage their jobs, candidates, reports and much more online.

Things to consider when you implement an ATS for a retail business

When you decide to embark on an ATS implementation journey, there are several key takeaways you should keep in mind.

I. Knowledgeable deployment team

The implementation of an ATS in a decentralized environment requires a highly skilled and knowledgeable implementation team. It is critical to make sure that your internal implementation team members and your vendor team have the right knowledge and expertise to successfully drive your project.

It is crucial to take the necessary time to design the solution and make the right implementation decisions. The detailed business requirements should be collected at the beginning of the project and regularly validated throughout the design process. Having some representatives from the field (store managers, district managers, etc.) on the design team is the best way to ensure you are meeting your business needs and building a solution that solves your pain points.

II. Ease of use

Without an ATS, job requisitions are usually created manually for the store managers and are loosely supported by the HR team. The data fields in the job requisitions can be inaccurate and/or incomplete.

Using an ATS, you can address this challenge by creating job templates for every store and every type of job. These templates pre-populate almost every field on the job requisition, in addition to providing the correct candidate selection workflow. The workflow enhances the store manager’s efficiency by hiding candidates that have not completed their application, or candidates that do not meet the basic requirements. Using job templates can vastly improve the store manager’s ability to hire quickly and effectively during peak season.

III. Security

One typical requirement most retailers have is that no store manager should have access to any jobs or candidates that are not associated with their particular store. In addition, there is some data that the company does not want to be viewable to store managers.

Best practice in ATS implementations suggests that this requirement be addressed through creating multiple user groups, driving security throughout the system. It is also crucial that the ATS be configured to meet complex security requirements set forth by the corporate Human Resources team.

Conclusion

Your retail business is unique, so it deserves an applicant tracking system that caters to that uniqueness. It’s worth taking the time to research ATS solutions, view demos, and compare options before you commit to a solution that may not be right for your company.

You don’t need a big budget to make big improvements to the way you manage your hiring.

Ready to get started? Request a demo and start hiring better talent, faster.